Fact check: How many children have been the victims of grooming gangs?

Thousands of children, many of them vulnerable, have been subject to appalling abuse by loosely defined networks of offenders, often known as ‘grooming gangs’, in cities and towns across the UK(Danny Lawson/PA) - (PA Archive)

This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.

Some widely shared posts on social media – including one shared on X by the platform’s owner, Elon Musk – have claimed that more than a million children have been victims of “grooming gangs” in the UK. We’ve also seen different estimates for the number of victims circulating, such as a figure of over 250,000.